Currently, the area of telecommunications is rapidly expanding. As a result, new products and services are constantly coming into the market, which promise more information, of more relevance to an individual user, and presented in a more timely fashion. It is an exciting time for consumers interested in such products and services; however, such products and services can be very costly. For example, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's) and cellular phones can cost hundreds of dollars depending on the features and functions included. Moreover, sending a megabyte of data content over a wireless network can cost hundreds of times what it costs to send the same data over a fixed network. Obviously, consumers would prefer that the costs come down, before they start using many of these new telecommunications products and services. Unfortunately, the providers of these products and services need more users before they can bring the costs down significantly. Advertising is one way to subsidize the costs of new products and services, thus making them more affordable for the consumer.
It has been suggested that in a telecommunications network, advertising messages could be applied to a calling party's line in between rings of the ringback signal. For example, such a system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,811,382 issued to Sleevi (the Sleevi patent). The Sleevi patent further suggests that a message could be associated with the calling party based on the calling party's phone number, the called party's phone number, or the long distance carrier of either party. In addition, messages could be changed based on the time of day, or the day of the week or month. One drawback to these suggestions, however, is that only the calling party is targeted and the association of messages is based on a limited number of criteria. Moreover, only using the period in between the ringback signals limits the type and number of messages that can be played to the caller. Another drawback is that the suggestions above only contemplate a fixed analog telecommunications network. New telecommunications systems, however, provide expanded opportunity to provide advertisers with highly targeted advertising and to subsidize the costs to the consumer of the products and services associated with these new systems.